Warfare has changed forever now that there are no secrets

This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Made of light balsa wood and powered by two V-12 1620hp Rolls-Royce engines, the de Havilland Mosquito was one of the fastest propeller planes in the second world war. But on July 26, 1944, it met its match. A German jet-powered Me-262 entered combat for the first time and attacked a Mosquito on a recce.

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The Me-262 was one of the Wunderwaffen that ranged from the first jet fighters to V1 and V2 rockets, which Germany hoped would turn around the war. Fortunately, this new generation of "wonder weapons" came too little, too late to make a difference against the far greater numbers of Allied weapons, even if those weapons weren't as effective. But finding themselves behind the curve in the technology of war certainly scared the Allies and changed the way that they planned to fight in the future.

For the next 70 years, the US, the UK and Nato led the way. Indeed, the shift from focusing on quantity to quality became their defence strategy. They made sure they had a clear advantage in technology, often a generation or more ahead, so that they could deter would-be enemies such as the Soviets, despite their far smaller militaries, or contemplate invading countries such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, even though the western strike forces were less than a third of the size of Iraq's.

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In the ensuing insurgencies in post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan this advantage has meant the core challenge has been to find the enemy, not the terms of the fight. As one Marine officer put it to me, if his force of 30 men were attacked by 100 Taliban, he would still be confident his unit would win. Even outnumbered, they'd relish the opportunity to get a chance to face, and defeat, an elusive foe in a stand-up fight.

Think about the change here. No Allied officer in the first or second world wars could have been so comfortable being outnumbered.

This advantage of technology, though, is an inheritance that simply may not be there for our militaries in future. The shift to using computer networks has connected us in amazing new ways, but it has also wired in a massive campaign of IP theft. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was to be the west's sophisticated new stealth fighter jet, years ahead of any competitors. Instead, the programme has been hacked and China is gearing up its own version, the J-31, for export. The F-35 is far from the only case; the Pentagon's testers found that every major weapons programme had "significant vulnerabilities".

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It is hard enough to win an arms race when you are paying for the other side's R&D. But new 21st century competitors are not just copycatting. China, for instance, is spending more on technology R&D than all of the EU, and is on pace to match the US in five years. It is doing world-class work in fields such as supercomputers and hypersonics.

Government once led the way, developing everything from radar to the internet itself and spinning it off to business, but now it's private businesses that are more often ahead. A common complaint of soldiers is not just that their gear is being outstripped by what they can buy at the mall, but that their foes can shop there as well.

Investments in tech that range from next-gen drones to lasers and a new generation of robotics, would be valuable in changing the nature of the game, now that our foes have caught up. But they are not enough. We have to change our expectations and assumptions. We think of ourselves as ahead of everyone else, but we cannot be so confident any more. Pride comes before a fall.

This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of WIRED magazine